The goal of the CHISOLS data is to differentiate leader transitions in which a new leader comes to office who depends on different societal groups for support than her predecessor from leader transitions where both the current leader and her predecessor rely on essentially the same groups for support. The data cover all countries with a population of more than 500,000 between 1919-2008. CHISOLS is available in two formats, one with the state-year as unit of analysis, and one with the leader as unit of analysis. The current release is version 4﻿.﻿0.

In addition to a link to download the data, you will find a detailed user's manual, narratives describing coding decisions for all cases, and a master bibliography on this site.

Please cite the data as: Mattes, Michaela, Brett Ashley Leeds, and Naoko Matsumura. 2016. Measuring Change in Source of Leader Support: The CHISOLS Dataset. Journal of Peace Research 53(2): 259-267. (available here)For any question or concerns, please contact Brett Ashley Leeds (leeds@rice.edu) or Michaela Mattes (m.mattes@berkeley.edu). We are very interested in receiving feedback that will allow us to improve the data. If you suspect an error, please contact us.